In the broadcast and entertainment industry, audiences are frequently asked to interact with a broadcast program so that their reaction to specific content can be gauged. The program may be entertainment or advertising where the producer is trying to measure or tune the program's popular appeal. The program can be a live political debate. In this case, the reaction of the audience can provide an instantaneous poll.
The program may be an interactive television program where the audience's reaction can become an element of the program itself. For example, during a broadcast of a sporting event, the announcer could indicate the level of audience support for the competing teams. Alternatively, the reaction of the audience could be used to control the outcome of the program, i.e., the audience determines the outcome of the story being broadcast.
In the past, focus groups have been used to capture people's reaction to programs. There, the members of the group are assembled in a room, and the group is observed as it reacts to the program as naturally as possible under the circumstances. Usually the members of the focus group are interviewed, individually or collectively, afterward to validate the observations.
This approach only works for a limited size of audience, and the members of the focus group must live within a reasonable distance of the focus group site. Focus groups are usually not held in people's homes, so some kind of reward must be given to induce people to participate. In addition, it takes effort to organize and structure focus groups, which makes focus groups unsuitable for many spontaneous real-time interactions of "live" broadcast programs. In addition, the results obtained can be severely skewed by the way that the small number of focus group members are selected.
Telephone polling is sometimes able to capture some aspects of audience reaction, but this method also has built-in limitations. A poll typically asks audience members to recall their reactions hours or days after the fact; it does not capture reactions while the program is happening, thereby introducing complex biases of which pollsters are aware, but for which they cannot compensate. Polling tends to be expensive, so it is only rarely feasible to poll thousands of people. And of course, polling is not a real-time technique.
It is also possible to attempt to capture audience reactions using other communications methods, such as requesting electronic mail from the audience. However, such methods have other limitations. If the responses are in prose, then human intervention is required to interpret the responses. This dramatically limits the size of the audience that can be handled.
Therefore, it is desired to provide a method and apparatus which would allow an audience to interact with a program independent of the audience's geographical distribution and size. It should also be possible to gather reactions from the members of the audience to the program without cooperation of the broadcaster. Furthermore, it should be possible to accurately correlate reactions to specific segments of the program so that variations of the reactions over time can be taken into consideration.